Leaf Storm Read online

  The men start to move. One of them leans over the box with the hammer and nails and the others go to the door. My mother gets up. She’s sweaty and pale. She pulls her chair, takes me by the hand, and tugs me aside so that the men can get by to open the door.

  At first they try to turn the bolt, which seems to be soldered to the rusty catches, but they can’t move it. It’s as if someone were pushing with all his strength from the street side. But when one of the men leans against the door and pounds it, the room is filled with the noise of wood, rusty hinges, locks soldered by time, layer upon layer, and the door opens, enormous, as if a man could go through on another’s shoulders; and there’s a long creaking of wood and iron that’s been awakened. And before we have time to find out what’s happened, the light bursts into the room, backward, powerful and perfect, because they’ve taken away the support that held it for two hundred years with the strength of two hundred oxen, and it falls backward into the room, dragging in the shadow of things in its turbulent fall. The men become brutally visible, like a flash of lightning at noon, and they stumble, and it looks as if they had to hold themselves up so that the light wouldn’t knock them down.

  When the door opens a curlew begins to sing somewhere in town. Now I can see the street. I can see the bright and burning dust. I can see several men sitting on the opposite sidewalk, their arms folded, looking toward the room. I hear the curlew again and I say to Mama: ‘Did you hear it?’ And she says yes, it must be three o’clock. But Ada told me that curlews sing when they get the smell of a dead man. I’m about to tell my mother just at the moment when I hear the sharp sound of the hammer on the head of the first nail. The hammer pounds, pounds, and fills everything up; it rests a second and pounds again, wounding the wood six times in a row, waking up the long, sad sound of the sleeping boards while my mother, her face turned the other way, looks through the window into the street.

  When the hammering is over the song of several curlews can be heard. My grandfather signals his men. They lean over, tip the coffin, while the one who stayed in the corner with his hat says to my grandfather: ‘Don’t worry, colonel.’ And then my grandfather turns toward the corner, agitated, his neck swollen and purple like that of a fighting cock. But he doesn’t say anything. It’s the man who speaks again from the corner. He says: ‘I don’t even think there’s anyone left in town who remembers this.’

  At that instant I really feel the quiver in my stomach. Now I do feel like going out back, I think; but I see that it’s too late now. The men make a last effort; they straighten up, their heels dug into the floor, and the coffin is floating in the light as if they were carrying off a dead ship to be buried.

  I think: Now they’ll get the smell. Now all the curlews will start to sing.

  GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

  CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD

  COLLECTED STORIES

  IN EVIL HOUR

  INNOCENT ERENDIRA AND OTHER STORIES

  LIVING TO TELL THE TALE

  LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

  MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES

  NEWS OF A KIDNAPPING

  NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL

  OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS

  ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE

  STRANGE PILGRIMS

  THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH

  THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH

  THE STORY OF A SHIPWRECKED SAILOR

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  GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

  CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD

  ‘My favourite book by one of the world’s greatest authors. You’re in the hands of a master’ Mariella Frostrup

  ‘On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on …’

  When newly-wed Ángela Vicario and Bayardo San Román are left to their wedding night, Bayardo discovers that his new wife is no virgin. Disgusted, he returns Ángela to her family home that very night, where her humiliated mother beats her savagely and her two brothers demand to know her violator, whom she names as Santiago Nasar.

  As he wakes to thoughts of the previous night’s revelry, Santiago is unaware of the slurs that have been cast against him. But with Ángela’s brothers set on avenging their family honour, soon the whole town knows who they plan to kill, where, when and why.

  ‘A masterpiece’ Evening Standard

  ‘A work of high explosiveness – the proper stuff of Nobel prizes. An exceptional novel’ The Times

  ‘Brilliant writer, brilliant book’ Guardian

  www.penguin.com

  GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

  COLLECTED STORIES

  ‘The stories are rich and unsettling, confident and eloquent. They are magical’ John Updike

  Sweeping through crumbling towns, travelling fairs and windswept ports, Gabriel García Márquez introduces a host of extraordinary characters and communities in his mesmerising tales of everyday life: smugglers, bagpipers, the President and Pope at the funeral of Macondo’s revered matriarch; a very old angel with enormous wings. Teeming with the magical oddities for which his novels are loved, Márquez’s stories are a delight.

  ‘These stories abound with love affairs, ruined beauty, and magical women. It is essence of Márquez’ Guardian

  ‘Of all the living authors known to me, only one is undoubtedly touched by genius: Gabriel García Márquez’ Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Márquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no one else can do’ Salman Rushdie

  www.penguin.com

  GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

  IN EVIL HOUR

  ‘A masterly book’ Guardian

  ‘César Montero was dreaming about elephants. He’d seen them at the movies on Sunday …’

  Only moments later, César is led away by police as they clear the crowds away from the man he has just killed.

  But César is not the only man to be riled by the rumours being spread in his Colombian hometown – under the cover of darkness, someone creeps through the streets sticking malicious posters to walls and doors. Each night the respectable townsfolk retire to their beds fearful that they will be the subject of the following morning’s lampoons.

  As paranoia seeps through the town and the delicate veil of tranquility begins to slip, can the perpetrator be uncovered before accusation and violence leave the inhabitants’ sanity in tatters?

  ‘In Evil Hour was the book which was to inspire my own career as a novelist. I owe my writing voice to that one book!’ Jim Crace

  ‘Belongs to the very best of Márquez’s work … Should on no account be missed’ Financial Times

  ‘A splendid achievement’ The Times

  www.penguin.com

  GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

  INNOCENT ERÉNDIRA AND OTHER STORIES

  ‘These stories abound with love affairs, ruined beauty, and magical women. It is the essence of Márquez’ Guardian

  ‘Eréndira was bathing her grandmother when the wind of misfortune began to blow …’

  Whilst her grotesque and demanding grandmother retires to bed, Eréndira still has floors to wash, sheets to iron, and a peacock to feed. The never-ending chores leave the young girl so exhausted that she collapses into bed with the candle still glowing on a nearby table – and is fast asleep when it topples over …

  Eight hundred and seventy-two thousand, three hundred and fifteen pesos, her grandmother calculates, is the amount that Eréndira must repay her for the loss of the house. As she is dragged by her grandmother from town to town and hawked to soldiers, smugglers and traders, Eréndira feels herself dying. Can the love of a virgin save the young whore from her hell?

  ‘It becomes more and more fun to read. It shows what “fabulous” really means’ Time Out

  ‘Márquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no-one else can do’ Salman Rushdie

  ‘One of this century’s most evocative writers’ Anne Tyler

  www.penguin.com
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  GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

  LIVING TO TELL THE TALE

  ‘A treasure trove, a discovery of a lost land we knew existed but couldn’t find. A thrilling miracle of a book’ The Times

  Living to Tell the Tale spans Gabriel García Márquez’s life from his birth in Colombia in 1927, through his emerging career as a writer, up to the 1950s and his proposal to the woman who would become his wife. Insightful, daring and beguiling in equal measure, it charts how García Márquez’s astonishing early life influenced the man who, more than any other, has been hailed as the twentieth century’s greatest and most-beloved writer.

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  GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

  LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

  ‘An amazing celebration of the many kinds of love between men and women’ The Times

  ‘It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love …’

  Fifty-one years, nine months and four days have passed since Fermina Daza rebuffed hopeless romantic Florentino Ariza’s impassioned advances and married Dr. Juvenal Urbino instead. During that half century, Florentino has fallen into the arms of many delighted women, but has loved none but Fermina. Having sworn his eternal love to her, he lives for the day when he can court her again.

  When Fermina’s husband is killed trying to retrieve his pet parrot from a mango tree, Florentino seizes his chance to declare his enduring love. But can young love find new life in the twilight of their lives?

  ‘A love story of astonishing power and delicious comedy’ Newsweek

  ‘A delight’ Melvyn Bragg

  www.penguin.com

  GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

  MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES

  ‘A velvety pleasure to read. Márquez has composed, with his usual sensual gravity and Olympian humour, a love letter to the dying light’ John Updike

  ‘The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself a gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin …’

  He has never married, never loved and never gone to bed with a woman he didn’t pay. But on finding a young girl naked and asleep on the brothel owner’s bed, a passion is ignited in his heart – and he feels, for the first time, the urgent pangs of love.

  Each night, exhausted by her factory work, ‘Delgadina’ sleeps peacefully whilst he watches her quietly. During these solitary early hours, his love for her deepens and he finds himself reflecting on his newly found passion and the loveless life he had led. By day, his columns in the local newspaper are read avidly by those who recognize in his outpourings the enlivening and transformative power of love.

  ‘Márquez describes this amorous, sometimes disturbing journey with the grace and vigour of a master storyteller’ Daily Mail

  ‘There is not one stale sentence, redundant word, or unfinished thought’ The Times

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  GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

  NEWS OF A KIDNAPPING

  ‘A story only a writer of Márquez’s stature could tell so brilliantly’ Mail on Sunday

  ‘She looked over her should before getting into the car to be sure no one was following her …’

  Pablo Escobar: billionaire drugs baron; ruthless manipulator, brutal killer and jefe of the infamous Medellín cartel. A man whose importance in the international drug trade and renown for his charitable work among the poor brought him influence and power in his home country of Colombia, and the unwanted attention of the American courts.

  Terrified of the new Colombian President’s determination to extradite him to America, Escobar found the best bargaining tools he could find: hostages.

  In the winter of 1990, ten relatives of Colombian politicians, mostly women, were abducted and held hostage as Escobar attempted to strong-arm the government into blocking his extradition. Two died, the rest survived, and from their harrowing stories Márquez retells, with vivid clarity, the terror and uncertainty of those dark and volatile months.

  ‘Reads with an urgency which belongs to the finest fiction. I have never read anything which gave me a better sense of the way Colombia was in its worst times’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘A piece of remarkable investigative journalism made all the more brilliant by the author’s talent for magical storytelling’ Financial Times

  ‘Compellingly readable’ Sunday Times

  www.penguin.com

  GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

  NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL

  ‘An imaginative writer of genius, the topmost pinnacle of an entire generation of Latin American novelists of cathedral-like proportions’ Guardian

  In a decaying Colombian town the Colonel and his sick wife are living from day to day, scraping together funds for food and medicine. Each Friday the Colonel waits for a letter to come in the post, hoping for the pension he is owed that will change their lives. While he waits the Colonel puts his hopes in his rooster – a prize bird that will make him money when cockfighting comes into season. But until then the bird – like the Colonel and his ailing wife – must somehow be fed …

  www.penguin.com

  GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

  OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS

  ‘Superb and intensely readable’ Time Out

  ‘An ash-gray dog with a white blaze on its forehead burst onto the rough terrain of the market on the first Sunday of December …’

  When a witch doctor appears on the doorstep of the Marquis de Casalduero prophesizing a plague of rabies in their Colombian seaport, he dismisses her claims – until, that is, he hears that his young daughter, Sierva María, was one of four people bitten by a rabid dog, and the only one to survive.

  Sierva María appears completely unscathed – but as rumours of the plague spread, the Marquis and his wife wonder at her continuing good health. In a town consumed by superstition, it’s not long before they, and everyone else, put her survival down to a demonic possession and begin to see her supernatural powers as the cause of the town’s woes. Only the young priest charged with exorcising the evil spirit recognizes the girl’s sanity, but can he convince the town that it’s not her that needs healing?

  ‘Brilliantly moving. A tour de force’ A.S. Byatt

  ‘A compassionate, witty and unforgettable masterpiece’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘At once nostalgic and satiric, a resplendent fable’ Sunday Times

  www.penguin.com

  GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

  ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE

  ‘The greatest novel in any language of the last 50 years. Márquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no-one else can do’ Salman Rushdie

  ‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice …’

  Pipes and kettledrums herald the arrival of gypsies on their annual visit to Macondo, the newly founded village where José Arcadio Buendía and his strong-willed wife, Úrsula, have started their new life. As the mysterious Melquíades excites Aureliano Buendía’s father with new inventions and tales of adventure, neither can know the significance of the indecipherable manuscript that the old gypsy passes into their hands.

  Through plagues of insomnia, civil war, hauntings and vendettas, the many tribulations of the Buendía household push memories of the manuscript aside. Few remember its existence and only one will discover the hidden message that it holds…

  ‘Should be required reading for the entire human race’ New York Times

  ‘No lover of fiction can fail to respond to the grace of Márquez’s writing’ Sunday Telegraph

  ‘It’s the most magical book I have ever read. I think Márquez has influenced the world’ Carolina Herrera

  www.penguin.com

  GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

  STRANGE PILGRIMS

  ‘Filled with greedy joys, with small pleasures, polished like apples against a sleeve’ Observer

  ‘The first thing Señora Prudencia Lin
ero noticed when she reached the port of Naples was that it had the same smell as the port of Riohacha …’

  Their distant, nostalgic memories of home, their sense of anonymity in a foreign land, the terrifying pang of vulnerability they feel as they step over the threshold into an alien world …

  Márquez’s strange pilgrims – the ageing prostitute preparing for death by teaching her dog to weep at her grave, the panicked husband scared for the life of his injured wife, the old man who allows his mind to wander on a long-haul flight from Paris – experience with all his humour, warmth and colour, what it is to be a Latin American adrift in Europe or, indeed, any outsider living far from home.

  ‘Celebratory and full of strange relish at life’s oddness. The stories draw their strength from Márquez’s generous feel for character, good and bad, boorish and innocent’ William Boyd

  ‘The most important writer of fiction in any language’ Bill Clinton

  ‘Often touching, often funny, always unexpected, the experience is as enriching as travel itself’ New Statesman